Magnesium alloys (including magnesium metal) are lightweight and have high specific strength. As such, they are expected to be widely used as next-generation lightweight structural materials.
On the other hand, magnesium alloys are hard-to-work materials that are known to easily crack or produce defects in the case where conventional processes such as a rolling process or forging are used. Thus, improving the strength of a magnesium alloy material through a work hardening process has been a challenge, and application fields of magnesium alloy materials have been limited to small electronic equipment components and similar applications in which material strength is not such an important factor.
In recent years, techniques have been disclosed for improving the strength of magnesium alloys by adding transition metals and certain rare earth metals to magnesium (see e.g., Non-Patent Documents 1 and 2).